TF2Lobby is website that helps random people to get to the competitive side of the tf2. It is much like gathers, but it doesn’t require IRC client.

After creating an account and logging in, you can join to lobby, talk at the main chat, see who is online and create new lobbies. After joining lobby, you choose side and which class you want to play and when the lobby is full 6v6 and everybody is ready, the match starts. TF2 is launched via the steam link that will automatically connect to the server and use the password. When the teams are ready at the server, its time to play.

The system is nice and works well. There is couple of servers dedicated for tf2lobby and the system how they work is very similar to l4d2 matchmaking system. Server that are dedicated for tf2lobby are running without admins 24/7. When a lobby is starting a game, the tf2lobby sends couple rcon commands to the server setting it up, then sends the password to the users who can connect. System always checks if there is players already on the server, so active games are not stopped if there is new game starting.

It is also possible to use own server with this system by giving server ip and rcon password. Tf2lobby will remotely setup the server via the rcon.

Currently the system has some kind of karma system. You gain karma by playing games or by getting rated by other users. You lose karma by leaving from game. The system looks nice, but so far there isn’t any way to see somebody’s karma. But I think that in future players that leaves in middle of match aren’t problem. There is also nice system that asks new player to join the game if somebody leaves before the match has been finished.

TF2Lobby also needs more EU servers. But there is usually somebody with their own EU server.

This year has been very interesting. My blog has gained stable amount of visitors every day (80-150 uniques) and there is good amount of subscribers also. Here is some statistics from this year:

• 2770 spam comments spammed
• 279 comments created
• 51 blog posts
• Most commented article: “World War for ipod” with 201 comments
• Total of 18.5G of bandwidth used
• 224m of hd space used (Containing everything that I host under this domain)
• Total of 1 77 617 hits to webserver
  

Top articles:

• World War iPod touch/iPhone game – 7080 hits
• Dropbox – 5387 hits
• Ultimate irssi guide for beginners – 5262 hits
• Play World War and other games on computer – 2807 hits
• Amazon ec2 – 2701 hits
• Woopra – 2352 hits
• iStat menus system monitor for mac – 2152 hits

Source of visitors:

• Direct 4.92%
• Links 55.25%
• Search engines 39.8%

Browsers:

• Firefox 68.89%
• IE 13.11%
• Safari 10.41%
• Chrome 3.23%

Operating systems:

• windows 67.72%
• Mac 14.09%
• Linux 11.68%

Plans for next year

• create over 51 blog posts
• create 2.0 version of Powerslash (Ajax and other cool stuff)
• create new theme for this blog
• complete Nethack

Happy new year to everybody!

Couple days without checking feed reader 10 times in a day… And I have 853 unread RSS-items! Great…

Rss is good technology and I like it, but it is way too easy to subscribe to many feeds and slowly changing the feed reader from useful software to flooding inbox with couple hundred unread news.

If you have same kind of problems try Lazyfeed. It is a feed reader that is designed to be simple and easy way to read feeds without wasting time managing feeds.

Unlike normal feed readers, you can’t subscribe to feeds regular feeds. You can subscribe to keywords and then lazyfeed will fetch posts from that are related and then show them to you in realtime.

There is one feature that I like LOT: Mr Lazy. Mr Lazy appears randomly and asks question based on other keywords added to list. Example when I had Linux keyword, Bob asked what is my favorite distro and then he added it to my playlist! Great way to recommend keywords that I may like.

Lazyfeed is good for random reading and just monitoring some stuf without getting massive unread numbers. It is also easy to subscribe to lots of topics without messing up the usability.

Only problem with lazyfeed is change to miss somethig useful. But I totally recommend to try it!

I have written about Amazon EC2 some time ago. I liked the EC2, but now I found new competitor that is better than EC2. Rackspace cloud is easier to use and has great support.

Prizing
Both Amazon and Rackspace offers virtually unlimited computing power/file storage for low cost pay-as-you-go prizing.

It looks like Rackspace offers cheaper servers. Rackspace also has small 256m server for 0.015$ and that is my most used server, because I usually don’t need big server.

Managing servers
Here is the point where the real difference becomes. Amazon has some kind of weird command line tools for managing the servers, firefox addon and a online  management console. The management console isn’t the best system, but it works. The main problem is that connecting to the server with ssh is damn difficult. It took 1hour for me first time to get the connection to the server…

Rackspace offers simple solution to connecting to the servers. They email the random server password for you. Then to can connect with normal ssh client to standart ports. No unnecessary key stuff etc. Rackspace also offers ajax console.

Support
I haven’t tried amazons support, because I haven’t a) needed help b) found where to get help

Rackspaces live support is awesome! There is always somebody to answer my questions.

In my opinion…

…Rackspacecloud is much better.

So… When the Google Wave was first time announced I registered myself for invite. And I got the invite couple days ago. (I have used all of my invites, so don’t bother asking for them) But I couldn’t use wave until now, because nobody of my friends had Google Wave.

But today one of my invites that I send was activated and I could test the Google Wave. The real time typing/editing is awesome. No more waiting for reply, conversation is much more faster and flexible.

I believe that Google Wave is not going to kill email. But it will definitely going to make co-working easier. For project management/brainstorming Google Wave could be awesome.

As this is Beta/Preview of the Wave, all of the features that I would like to see isn’t at Wave yet. Example extension/settings stuff is missing. I hope that the system allows me to integrate email, Twitter and Google Reader to Wave.